The girl stopped abruptly. It had been on her tongue to say—"It was that made me go with him."
But she did not say it. And while Alice's mind, rushing miserably over the past, was trying to piece together some image of what had happened, Hester began to talk intermittently about the preceding weeks. Alice tried to stop her; but to thwart her only produced a restless excitement, and she had her way.
She spoke of Philip with horror, yet with a perfectly clear sense of her own responsibility.
"I needn't have gone—but I would go. There was a devil in me—that wanted to know. Now I know—too much. I'm glad it's over. This life isn't worth while—not for me."
So, from these lips of eighteen, came the voice of the world's old despairs!
Presently she asked peremptorily for Meynell, and he came to her.
"Uncle Richard, I want to be sure"—she spoke strongly and in her natural voice—"am I Philip's wife—or—or not? We were married on January 25th, at the Mairie of the 10th Arrondissement, by a man in a red scarf. We signed registers and things. Then—when we quarrelled—Philip said—he wasn't certain about that woman—in Scotland. You might be right. Tell me the truth, please. Am I—his wife?"
And as the words dropped faintly, the anxiety in her beautiful death-stricken eyes was strange and startling to see. Through all her recklessness, her defiance of authority and custom, could be seen at last the strength of inherited, implanted things; the instinct of a race, a family, overleaping deviation.
Meynell bent over her steadily, and took her hand in both his own.
"Certainly, you are his wife. Have no anxiety at all about that. My inquiries all broke down. There was no Scotch marriage."